Renji stood at the edge of the wreckage and looked at it. Broken wood spread across thirty feet of road. Wheel spokes pointing in directions wheels don’t go. Their supplies distributed across the ground like the carriage had simply exhaled everything at once before lying down. A single wheel had come to rest upright against a tree, which seemed almost deliberate, like punctuation.

He studied it for a moment with a quiet, closed expression.

"Alright," he said. "Let’s see what’s still usable."

He was the first to move into it. He picked up a bag that had survived intact and set it aside. Then another. Kaede worked the opposite side without being asked. Ayra gathered what the impact had scattered furthest. They worked without ceremony and without talking about what they’d lost, because talking about it wouldn’t put it back together.

When they had everything worth carrying distributed between them, Renji looked down the road — at the dark, at the forest that continued endlessly ahead, at the complete absence of anything that would make continuing easier.

"Right then," he said. "We walk."

They walked.

The forest did what forests do when you’re tired — it stretched. Every hour felt like it doubled on itself, the trees repeating, the road turning into a suggestion and then less than that. They settled into the silence of people who don’t have words left, only movement. Renji took the front. Kaede stayed at the rear. In between, Ayra drifted close to Rei without making it obvious, which was something she was good at.

Rei lasted longer than he’d expected her to. She was tougher than she looked, which he’d noticed before and kept noticing. But eventually her steps started shortening, and then she stumbled on a root that wasn’t even large, and caught herself on a tree, and stood there for a moment with her head down.

"I..." She stopped. Started again. "I can’t keep going."

Her voice came out small and she clearly hated that it did.

Renji looked up at what was visible of the sky through the canopy. Dark, and getting darker.

"We camp here," he said. No deliberation. Just the decision.

Kaede was already assessing the area. "There’s a natural break near those rocks. Ground’s more even."

"Take it."

It came together without ceremony. Kaede cleared the ground in the space between the rocks and established a rough perimeter that would give them warning if anything came from the tree line. Ayra gathered dry branches by feel in the low light, moving efficiently and without complaint, piling them in a configuration that would actually catch. Rei sorted through the remaining bags — what they had for food, what they had for sleeping, what was left of the medical supplies she used for healing that didn’t come from herself.

Renji walked the perimeter slowly and thoroughly before coming back and helping Rei secure the tent fabric they’d salvaged over the rockface as a windbreak.

They ate. Preserved food from sealed packets, the kind that tasted like a sincere attempt at something rather than the thing itself. Nobody complained. They sat near the small fire and ate in the comfortable quiet of people who’d been through enough together that silence didn’t require filling. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

When the food was gone Renji leaned back and looked at the fire.

"I’ll take first watch," he said. "Sleep."

He said it the way he said most things — like it was already settled, like the conversation had been had and concluded and all that remained was the execution. Kaede opened her mouth, looked at him, closed it again. Whatever she found in his face she apparently decided not to argue with tonight.

One by one they settled. Rei was gone almost immediately, her breathing evening out within minutes of lying down, which told him more about how hard she’d been pushing than anything she’d said. Ayra lasted a little longer, her eyes open and watching the canopy before they finally stilled.

Kaede was last. She watched him for a moment from where she lay, something almost like concern operating behind her usual expression.

Then it passed, and she closed her eyes, and slept.

Renji sat beside the dying fire and let everything ache.

It throbbed in layers — the deep muscle soreness first, then the sharper edges of the cuts underneath Rei’s healing, then the duller persistent ache in his sword arm that had been there since the first gravefang hit him. He catalogued it without complaint. Pain meant he was still here.

The forest was quiet in the specific way that forests are never actually quiet. Small sounds. Distant sounds. Nothing that alarmed him.

He stared into the low flames and thought about his stepbrother.

The thought arrived the way it always did — without invitation, without gentleness, with the particular heat of something that had been sitting long enough to become something harder than anger. Every hour further from the palace was another hour the distance had grown and another hour the promise had aged and another reminder of every face attached to it, every reason the promise existed in the first place.

Come back and burn it down.

He sat with that for a long time

The fire burned lower. The forest breathed around him. He didn’t move.

"You should sleep."

Ayra’s voice, soft and without any of the alarm that comes from someone who startled themselves awake. She had simply opened her eyes and was watching him, calm, like she’d been half-aware for a while.

"I’m fine," he said.

"I know you’re fine. You should still sleep." She sat up quietly, drawing her knees to her chest. "I’ll watch."

He looked at her for a moment. She looked back at him with the patient expression of someone who’d already decided how this was going to go and was simply waiting for him to arrive at the same conclusion.

He nodded once.

He lay down beside what was left of the fire and closed his eyes. The ground was hard and the aches were still there and the thought about his stepbrother was still there underneath them.

He was asleep inside a minute.